What if we just gave people money? The economics of time and freedom

The idea that there’s only so much money to go around makes a bastard kind of sense to the poor. If impossible decisions abound in their lives, it must be true of governments, too. Certainly, that’s how federal budgets are framed. But beyond impressionism, we know the household budget is not analogous to state budgets in any meaningful way.

A belief in this scarcity, as real as it may feel, is conceptually deformed.

So, when clipped transmissions of a strange, and I thought new, idea called universal basic income (UBI) struck my radar like interstellar rescue messages half a decade ago, I was sceptical. Instantly dismissive, actually.

Money for everyone, even rich people? It made my skin crawl. That’s what franking credits and superannuation tax concessions are for! It was hard enough for people at the bottom to live now – and that was with means testing to theoretically keep benefits for those who needed them most.

What I failed to understand, then, as a product of Australia’s targeted welfare system, is that I was also a product of the bludgeoning conditionality that’s necessary, we’re told, to sustain it.

Welfare, per successive Commonwealth governments, should go only to those who need it. So-called working age payments like JobSeeker are for people who cannot find work or who are between jobs. There were 885,000 people on this payment in July 2024; 370,000 had been officially assessed as having a ‘partial capacity to work’, which means, in common parlance, they have a disability.

In the official terminology of Australia’s social security law, these people are known as ‘compellable’. They must be looking for work, or some denuded equivalent of ‘activation’ – welfare recipients and almonds, it turns out, must be activated – or else have their payments suspended and then cancelled.

Successive governments have performed this policy compulsion for decades now, using an increasingly rococo pyramid scheme of outsourced private ‘employment service providers’ vested with the power to make a fortune off the backs of welfare recipients. Part of this fortune flows from their ability to suspend government payments if a person refuses to enrol in a training module offered by a company that can also be owned by the job provider.

Nice work if you can get it.

The Commonwealth spends $17 billion a year on income support for the 885,000 people on JobSeeker and then another $1.3 billion a year just on contracts to private companies to enforce the web of conditions attached to receiving that same income support. It’s inefficient even writing it out.

All this chicanery because they don’t want some povo making art on the government dime.

The appeal of UBI, not fully apparent to me until I almost collapsed mentally from overwork and just wanted to go and make art on that government dime, is that there are no conditions. In its pure form, a UBI is money with no strings attached. No more compliance. No more make-work.

What I find most interesting about the work that’s starting to crystallise on UBI and similar programs is not so much that people choose to continue working in addition to receiving a basic, survivable income – that always seemed obvious to me – but that in almost every study, one of the benefits that accrues is, quite literally, a future.

In Finland, where a trial was branded an actual and political failure, the results from an unconditional UBI being provided to two thousand randomly chosen, initially unemployed people nevertheless revealed important insights. Early results showed no boost in employment, which helped torpedo the project because permission for the experiment flowed from testing whether it could help solve problems of unemployment for the state. Still, the final results revealed there was actually a small increase in employment. More credibly, to me, the study also significantly improved multiple measures of recipients’ wellbeing. McKinsey & Company, the corporate undertaker with a reputation for brutality, found that the ‘basic income seems to have improved all the major components of life satisfaction’. In particular, ‘people receiving the basic income reported better health and lower levels of stress, depression, sadness, and loneliness – all major determinants of happiness – than people in the control group,’ four of the firm’s partners and researchers found. ‘Recipients of the basic income also demonstrated more confidence in their cognitive skills, assessing their ability to remember, learn, and concentrate at higher levels than the control group did.’

They felt a higher degree of trust in their own future but also in their fellow citizens and public institutions.

None of this feels especially revelatory to me, but the evidence pops up again and again around the world as more trials and studies get going or conclude, mapping a rising interest in the idea of UBI.

In Ireland, a trial of a basic income for artists has now been made permanent after showing remarkable early results: while income from non-arts work reduced by about €280 per month, the increase in money earnt from artistic endeavours was nearly double that at €500.

This data shows, of course, that artists were able to spend more time in the field of their talents than working casual shifts in a café or on a bike delivering takeaway for a grim fee. Naturally, this shift in the type of work, from wages to self-employment, should counter the antipathy towards UBI from old capital.

It’s not necessarily that people will stop working – in study after study, there’s either no observable change in employment (but an increase in wellbeing, which saves government money in other ways) or a jump in employment. No, what bothers some critics is that it’s not the right kind of work for the ‘propulsive logic’ of capitalism, as the South African writer Hein Marais describes it. The factories will not run on dreamers with easels and a few bucks. And how can global capital maintain its momentum if the workers with bad jobs in bad places are given the chance to plan for a better future?

One of the most rigorous research efforts, which began in 2016 and is ongoing, involves a three-group UBI in Kenya where every adult in every house in several communities receives a basic income in one of three ways: as a lump sum, as a promise of regular payments over twelve years equal to the lump sum, or as a set of regular payments over two years.

Most people in the Kenya trial are employed in menial farm work, if they’re employed at all. So far, over the long-term UBI stream, the number of non-agricultural enterprises has jumped by one quarter while agricultural assets – the price of land, responding to the purchasing power of recipients, but also of small and large livestock – have increased in value by 35 per cent. Crucially, in the long-term stream, while there’s a net economic boost in addition to profound wellbeing milestones, there’s a significant drop in hours of waged work. Quelle horreur! However, this drop is more than outpaced by the increase in hours worked in ‘non-agricultural self-employed work’.

Freedom in this instance is created by the sheer fact of money. Nothing else has changed in the lives of these people, in aggregate, other than money. Particularly in the long-term stream, the effect isn’t only about money – but the promise of stable income into the future. This promise creates what the economists call ‘option value’ or, more humanely, the ability to afford to wait. For the right job, the right opportunity.

People want to work. And that includes work that’s not itemised or valued by capital. A UBI can be brought into being without laying waste to these options but in addition to them so that freedom to choose might actually mean something.

Rick Morton is an author and reporter currently living in Paris.

This is an edited extract of Rick Morton’s full essay, Back to the future: The economics of time and space, published in Griffith Review 91: On the Money.

Griffith Review is a quarterly literary journal. Each edition explores a different theme, bringing together long-form critical and analytical non-fiction and creative writing. Available in all good bookshops, or you can read online or subscribe here.